Bonum Certa Men Certa

Will Wayland Even Survive the Collapse of IBM? X11 Likely Will.

Reprinted with permission from Ryan Farmer

One of IBM’s stated reasons for pulling investments in actually important Linux software is that they need to focus on Wayland.



I recently read on the mailing list, one of the Wayland developers basically admitting that they break the APIs and ABI all the time and usually don’t even get much “mileage”, so to speak, out of doing it. This shows, to me, that they rushed it out the door way before it was ready.



Developers tend to have noticed this. However, IBM doesn’t care. Their goal is to throw their weight around and make everyone use Wayland, even though it’s horribly broken.



All of the hideous things that X11 does were either fixed by extensions and patching over the last 39 years or don’t really matter much anymore.



In some cases, complaints about how X11 does things that “justified” starting over don’t even happen anymore.



For example, one of the Wayland developers (in an article that propagated to Phoronix) used an example of Flash and Java being subwindows of the Web browser.



Well, NPAPI (and Chrome’s version, PPAPI) is dead.



For better or worse, everything that an NPAPI (PPAPI) plug-in did is handled by the browser and the browser window now, so we no longer run into this problem in the window that IBM Red Hat says is the only one on your screen that matters.



(Because downloading an entire office program into your browser, which needs networking and someone else’s permission to continue running, is cool and modern.)



It dawned on me that while I was trying to get Fallout 4 working (in my recent post), almost all of the serious issues with the game that weren’t just some package that didn’t come pre-installed on openSUSE were actually Wayland problems, and not just Wayland problems, XWayland problems.



XWayland has its own special problems while running on Wayland that don’t happen when you just run your window manager on X11 directly.



Is X11 old? Sure. Does it matter much? Not if you ask me, as a user.



I would much rather have SeaMonkey and other X11 applications show up clean, crisp, clear, and scaled right, than smudgy and vaguely reminiscent of “Microsoft Glaucoma-vision”, which is what I refer to as the way Windows 10 and 11 scale things incorrectly and then put “Vaseline on the fonts”. This is just shoddy craftsmanship.



If you can believe this shit, Microsoft actually patented that (since expired), and called it a feature. It looked like the original edit of Star Wars where Luke Skywalker was hovering around on his speeder on Tatooine and George Lucas said they hid the wheels under it by smearing a blob of Vaseline on the camera lens.



Wine, which is a very important program to me, runs Windows programs. It uses X11.



When it runs on XWayland it picks up lag and stability problems and passes them along to the Windows programs and games I want to run.



When I double-click on Fallout or something, I want my game to run. Not skip frames and then jitter and die because XWayland doesn’t work properly, STILL.



One of the reasons I give to Windows users for why they should switch to Linux is that I’ve had really good luck with Wine. Wine is still not ported over to use Wayland and it’s not clear when or if it will ever be.



The openSUSE project avoided so much drama, so many difficult people, and so much political nonsense and technical problems by remaining with KDE and bothering to ship a version of it you can use.



One of the reasons IBM Red Hat dropped KDE entirely is that they were hoping to inflict a mortal wound, the same reason IBM supported defamation of an elderly man (Richard Stallman, who is 70.) and then stopped paying for GNU software development, but they still “freeload” off it.



Roy Schestowitz tells me he’s rarely seen IBM hiring Germans who have worked on KDE.



That’s fine by me if it’s true. That just means that we won’t have the most competent people going to work for IBM, being told to do dumb pointless redundant broken shit with GNOME and Wayland, and hiding under a desk when the Pointy Hair Boss goes by laying people off.



If Wayland still isn’t working right after 15 years, if it still behaves like some bugged, crummy, perpetual beta software, when will it work right?



I’m actually amused that IBM Red Hat considers it so production ready that it’s been in “Enterprise Linux” for a while.



Sure, as a user of an Enterprise Linux clone (or RHEL), you could fight your way like a salmon swimming upstream, using the last of its energy and time on Earth to lay eggs and die, fixing all of the really terrible engineering decisions IBM has made for you.



Some of the clones support BtrFS and DTrace (Oracle), and I think KDE is available as unofficial packages, but I think the Enterprise Desktop really deserves better software, and the developers of openSUSE realize that moving crackpot shit like Wayland over to a stable Linux distro just turns it into “Fedora with older packages”.



Some distributions, especially Red Hat, have this odd sort of definition of stability.



This definition means the software might be full of bugs, it might glitch, but at least it doesn’t change much. To those ends, IBM even ignores security patches.



And I guess I can see why you would shove Wayland in a desktop on an enterprise distro, when soon after, you divest from desktop work anyway.



It can load Firefox. It’s perfect. Firefox loads Office 365. Firefox and Office 365 are the only two things people should want to use.



What? You want to run software? On your computer? Oh…



It’s true that maybe in some tortured way, years from now, it will replace most of what X11 can do and, maybe someday Wine will work properly with XWayland. But it’s still not now.



Even on Fedora with GNOME I was still running into Wayland problems.



I wouldn’t be surprised if X11 outlives Fedora, RHEL, IBM, and on into the next century.



It’s become a fixture, like an old refrigerator that never breaks down.



KWin running so reliably on X11, mostly at parity with all of the redundant work just needed to get it working at all on Wayland (except that the Wayland version of the code isn’t quite stable), sort of proves that this has all been rather something of a misadventure of negative work that’s gone on for years.



IBM has been throwing out a lot of FUD about X11 being “abandoned”, but the mailing lists tell a story of something that still gets a lot of development attention considering that it’s 39 years old and feature complete, in ways that would only matter if you’re actually running it, and not just XWayland.



Even the Direct Rendering Infrastructure and DDX stuff for some video cards from the 90s just got updates last month. And that goes out pretty far from the core code.



As Free Software, X11 can live as long as it’s still useful. Nobody can “take it away” or force you to stop using it.



Finally…



Security! Everyone’s favorite refuge for when they’ve lost all their other arguments.



Sure Wayland can stop applications from reading input events from the other ones.



At least in theory, it can. Everything can be broken. There’s always bugs.



However, I just simply don’t care. This isn’t Windows (where applications can literally just dump dlls into each other and load malware into Firefox, for example).



I don’t have “Linux malware” because I haven’t installed any.



So to me, this “reason” to have Wayland is another fallacious argument.



This same “security feature” is one of the reasons why people have to fall back to X11 to make legitimate software work. So adding “security” that breaks too many real legitimate things is what Linus Torvalds (before they made him go to “therapy” he didn’t need” called “Masturbating Monkeys”).



It’s up there with “Secure Boot” and “attestations”.



But that’s a whole different story.



Recent Techrights' Posts

A Note on SimilarWeb
Or why SimilarWeb is meaningless for more than 99% of the sites on the Web
IBM Said to be Shutting Down Offices or Sites in the United States
the press can no longer avoid admitting that IBM moves many jobs to India
LLM Slop as Attack Vector on the Reputation of Linux
The attacks on Linux have escalated to information warfare
 
Traf-O-Data, the Company That Jeffrey Epstein's BFF (Bill Gates) (Co)Founded 53 Years and Went Out of Business Due to Heavy Losses
Who will die first, Bill or Microsoft?
Why Microsoft's Shares Sank Almost 20% in Recent Months (the Bubble is Imploding)
verified press reports from the past 24 hours
GNU/Linux Rises to Almost 5% in Algeria While Windows Sinks to All-Time Low
GNU/Linux grew tenfold
Where to Get More Gags
A valued reader recommended that to us
Links 04/04/2025: Tech Stock (Inc. GAFAM) Fall, Google Pretends to Do End-to-End Encrypted Emails (With Google in Control)
Links for the day
To Participate in Fedora Diversity You Must Use Proprietary Software
Not for the first time either
Yandex About to Be Three Times Bigger Than Microsoft (Bing) in Asia
That's about 60% of the world's population
Gemini Links 04/04/2025: Decoupling Updates, Elaho as Gemini Client
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Thursday, April 03, 2025
IRC logs for Thursday, April 03, 2025
Microsoft's Trouble in Africa and Asia
A new all-time high for GNU/Linux
Brett Wilson LLP Reported to the Solicitors Regulation Authority (SRA)
The saddest thing in all this is that law firms can maintain high standards shall they wish to
Links 03/04/2025: Tariff Pains and C.D.C. Cuts
Links for the day
StatCounter: Microsoft is Masking a Disaster, It's Way Behind DeepSeek Already and Interest in LLMs Has Waned
it turns out the money "raised" for "Open" "AI" may not even exist at all
Links 03/04/2025: SoftBank Money for Microsoft "Open" "AI" Probably Doesn't Even Exist, Wikimedia Foundation Blasts LLM Nuisance While Microsoft Admits Demand Has Shrunk
Links for the day
Gemini Links 03/04/2025: Patch Panel and Pictures
Links for the day
Islamic Republic of Iran: GNU/Linux at All-time High This Month, Windows Falls to 12%
Vista 10 is up this month despite being "end of life" (EoL) soon
Indonesia: All-Time Highs for GNU/Linux
What's noteworthy right now is the growth of GNU/Linux
statCounter Says GNU/Linux Usage is Up Again (Internationally)
some preliminary April data
Only on April 1st Can the Free Software Foundation Associate With Microsoft's Open Source Initiative (OSI)
We saw some pranks that day linking the FSF to Microsoft (e.g. "endorsing" Windows)
Confirmed in the Mainstream Media: A Lot of Microsoft "Workloads" Were Just LLM Slop (Helping to Fake Growth for Years, as Microsoft Had Paid "Open" "AI" to Become a "Client") and Demand is Rapidly Waning, Datacentres Canceled and/or Shut Down
Anything to facilitate further accounting fraud
Taiwan's Media Covers Closure of Microsoft's "AI" Lab, It's Time to Talk About the Gradual Death of Windows and Implosion of the "AI" Bubble
Earlier this week we showed that mostly Asian media had the 'nerve' to mention Microsoft silently shutting down its 'AI' lab
IBM Gets Rid of Kelly Chambliss as Mass Layoffs Reported in IBM Consulting, IBM Loses Key Contracts/Graft
IBM Consulting has been in disarray lately
More Gains for GNU/Linux, Based on Web Surveys
the Steam site shows rapid growth for "Linux" this month
Slopwatch: Anti-Linux Articles, Not Even Written by Humans
Why aren't Web sites more vocal about this problem?
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Wednesday, April 02, 2025
IRC logs for Wednesday, April 02, 2025
Links 03/04/2025: Apple Fined Over Secret Surveillance, "Elegant Writer For A More Civilized Age"
Links for the day
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: Books and Cold Tea
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: More Layoffs, Nokia Again Takes Advantage of Illegal and Unconstitutional Patent Court With Nokia Staff as 'Judges'
Links for the day
Links 02/04/2025: Seizures and Returns to Windows of 24 Years Ago
Links for the day
LLM Slop Helps Obscure and Distort News About Layoffs (IBM, GAFAM)
It's hard to find accurate information
Links 02/04/2025: Microsoft Developers Are Threatening to Go on Strike, World Backup Day Noted
Links for the day
Gemini Protocol Has Growing Appeal (the Web Got Too Bloated and Full of LLM Slop)
For any "data plan" with bandwidth limits or "tiers" it would be cheaper to use/browse Geminispace
The Web Can Survive LLM Slop, But Only If We Collectively Shun and Discourage Serial Sloppers
Doing nothing ought not be a possibility
Amid Secret Shut-downs and Mass Layoffs at Microsoft (4 Waves of Layoffs in 3 Months of 2025) Some Microsoft Staff Expected to Go On Strike
workers going on strike
Gemini Links 02/04/2025: No more on Mastodon and Gemini Mention Script in Go
Links for the day
Over at Tux Machines...
GNU/Linux news for the past day
IRC Proceedings: Tuesday, April 01, 2025
IRC logs for Tuesday, April 01, 2025
My Motion Disbarring or “Striking Off” Brett Wilson LLP for Enabling Violent Americans Who Try to Crush Microsoft Critics in the United Kingdom by Multiple SLAPPs
"Guns for hire" (for Microsoft people who received Microsoft salaries)
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office Hijacked Again by Patent Litigation Industry, as President Cheeto Prioritises Aggressors
The "mafia" has taken over the "industry" and the Federal system (justice and constitutions trampled upon)
Ubuntu Slop and FUD Manufactured With LLMs and Funded (by Oneself) 'Studies'
Slop and FUD are ruining the Web